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"Charter schools promised new education innovations. Instead, they produced scam after new scam"

"Arthur Camins explains what is wrong with the TFA approach but cautions that the recruits should not be blamed or criticized. I agree. The recruits are idealistic and well-intentioned. They are akin to Peace Corps volunteers. No one suggests that Peace Corps volunteers are qualified to be Foreign Service officers or diplomats or ambassadors. Blame the organization for its hubris, not the kids. It is the hubris that produced John White (Louisiana), Kevin Huffman (Tennessee), Eric Guckian (North Carolina), Michelle Rhee."

"Michelle Rhee continues her descent into parody. You might have thought that teaching students to read would be a good way to evaluate educational performance, but no. Rhee's StudentsFirst organization has released a report card grading states-on their education policies, not their educational results. In fact, not one of the states StudentsFirst ranks in the top five is in the top half of states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, "the nation's report card," when it comes to eighth grade reading scores, and only one is in the top half when it comes to eighth grade math."

"A few days ago, CNN interviewed former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee about American education. Rhee, predictably, said that American education is terrible, that test scores are flat, and that we are way behind other nations on international tests. I disagree with Rhee. She constantly bashes American education, which is one of the pillars of our democratic society. Our public schools educate 90% of the population, and we should give the public schools some of the credit for our nation's accomplishments as the largest economy and the greatest engine of technological innovation in the world. It's time to set the record straight."

"I received the following description of the appearance of Michelle Rhee and her husband at the University of Hawaii, where they lectured on "Ethics and Education." Rhee paused briefly from her national campaign to raise $1 billion to remove teachers' collective bargaining rights, to strip them of tenure and seniority, and to promote vouchers and charters, to share her wisdom about American education."

"For three years, 50 percent of the evaluations of many D.C. public school teachers were based on students standardized test scores, a key part of the ground-breaking IMPACT assessment system introduced by Michelle Rhee. Now, Rhee's successor as schools chancellor, Kaya Henderson, and her leadership team have decided that 50 percent is too much and that the better percentage for a job rating to be linked to test scores is 35 percent, as my colleague Emma Brown reported in this story. Sounds reasonable, right? It isn't."

StudentsFirst was formed by Michelle Rhee in 2010 after resigning as chancellor of D.C. schools.  The name 'StudentsFirst' implies that they have a mission to oppose those who put students second, third, or even last.  In very clear terms, they say that it is the teacher's unions who are putting the needs of the adults above the needs of the students.  When the New York franchise of StudentsFirst started a few months ago, they even described it as a "union for students." The name 'StudentsFirst' is well chosen.  It definitely makes anyone who says they oppose them have to give a big explanation along with it.  There are other organizations that have similar names, like 'Stand For Children', or that have slogans like it, most notably in New York City where the slogan of The Department of Education is "Children First.  Always."  That 'always' kind of makes me chuckle.  It's like they are saying "Children First," and then someone says "but aren't there some times where putting the children first could be bad for the system as a whole?," and they just answer "Always."

SKDKnickerbocker (SKD) is one of the top firms providing outside assistance to labor coalitions while raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars for work to undermine organized labor, particularly teachers unions. Led by Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director and current Democratic Party advisor, SKD has spearheaded state-based campaigns for Students First, the anti-teacher's union charter and school privatization group founded by former Chancellor of DC Public Schools Michelle Rhee.

This is all happening just before the release of a major movie called "Won't Back Down," a pro-parent trigger film with Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Holly Hunter that was produced by Walden Media, a company owned by uber-conservative entrepreneur Philip Anschutz. Walden helped distribute "Waiting for Superman," a tendentious documentary that mischaracterized charter schools as a systemic answer to public education's problems and hailed Michelle Rhee as a reform hero. You don't have to guess about the message of "Won't Back Down" - watch this trailer.

Doris and Donald Fisher, founders of the GAP clothing company, began contributing to education-related causes through various philanthropic organizations in the late 1990s. The Doris and Donald Fisher Fund is the current foundation, although it was formerly known as the Doris and Donald Fisher Education Fund, is still sometimes abbreviated as D2F2, and earlier was known as the Pisces Foundation. The Fishers were early supporters of Edison Schools, and have been major supporters of KIPP and Teach for America. Although I cannot find some of the Fisher's earliest IRS 990s, the family also supported a young organization, The New Teacher Project, founded by Michelle Rhee. As noted on the Fisher's 2011 Form 990, the foundation contributed $250,000 to Rhee's newest organization, StudentsFirst. I gathered Form 990s for the fiscal years ending in 2003 through 2011, and pulled information about contributions made during each of those years. You can find all of these Form 990s through Guidestar.org or Foundation Center's 990 Finder. You can see the information I pulled in an Excel file on my Data page or check out the results below.

You would think everyone would want to review the evidence before rushing to implement schemes that haven't been shown to work. But when folks like Michelle Rhee control the debate - a woman who crows about her changes to the Washington DC evaluation system when they had no discernible effect on student learning - politicians must feel they have to follow her lead. They need to urgently do something - anything! - to prove how much they care about kids.

An often quoted 'statistic' by various 'reformers' is that an effective teacher is three times as good as an ineffective one.  Sometimes it is said that the ineffective teacher gets a half year of progress while the effective teacher gets one and a half years of progress. I don't doubt that there are a small percent of teachers who have little classroom control, mostly new teachers, who only manage to get a half a year of progress.  I also can imagine a rare 'super-teacher' who somehow gets one and a half years of progress.  (I think I'm a pretty good teacher, but I doubt I get a year and a half worth of progress.)  I don't think there is a very accurate way to measure this nebulous 'progress' aside from test scores, but I could still imagine that there is a 'true' number, even if we will never be able to accurately calculate it. As this statistic has been quoted by Melinda Gates recently on PBS and by Michelle Rhee in various places, including the StudentsFirst website I thought, in response to a recent post on Diane Ravitch's blog I would investigate the source of this claim.

In a brilliant presentation Stuyvesant HS teacher Gary Rubinstein uses statistics to punch holes in the high stakes testing standardized testing program. He also finds evidence in the stats that charter schools cream better students. Then he addresses the reason why Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee opposed the release of data scores --- they knew people like Gary would be able to show how irrelevant they really were. "It's like in trying to measure temperature, you count the number of people wearing hats." Then he addresses the issue of why a union agreed to any of this, even 20% given that under the current system almost everyone potentially can be rated ineffective. He offered the union his help to salvage the other 20% but has not heard back yet. There's supposed to be this evil union only about the adults but they really aren't doing a good job at that.

I am trying to understand Michelle Rhee. She has allied herself with the most right-wing governors in the nation, yet she claims to be a Democrat. She has worked with Republican Rick Scott in Florida, Republican John Kasich in Ohio, Republican Chris Christie in New Jersey, Republican Rick Snyder in Michigan, among others. Any governor who wants to cut teachers' rights and benefits can call on her to stand with him. Wherever there is a governor eager to dismantle and privatize public education, she is there at his side.

Last Friday, Michelle Rhee was on Brian Lehrer's radio show. The segment, unsurprisingly, is a textbook example of the incoherence of the corporate reform movement. I'll have more to say about the rest of the interview later, but for now, I want to focus in on a remarkable passage, starting at 18:19. I have transcribed it in its entirety because I think it needs to go on Rhee's permanent record (all emphasis mine)

Perhaps most importantly, one of the best ways to improve public education would be to work to alleviate those factors beyond teachers' control that affect students' ability to learn. They are some of the same factors that lead to Louisiana's dismal Kids COUNT rating-unemployment, poverty, violence, crime rates, family instability, childhood hunger, access to health care. No, no, and no, according to the politicians. What do teachers know about education, anyway? Public-school teachers, according to most of the Senate members who testified, are obviously part of the problem, not the solution, so it's better to follow noneducators' recommendations when improving schools. The philosophies behind the legislation passed last week echo the pro-charter, pro-private philosophies of distinctly non-local figures as diverse as the anti-union former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee (who now finds her former district embroiled in a cheating scandal), the deep-pocket GOP puppetmasters the Koch Brothers and, most significantly, the American Legislative Exchange Council. (ALEC, a conservative think tank that prizes small government and free markets, hosts large meetings at which it gives politicians dummy legislation that they can personalize and file in their home states; its influence is clear in some of Louisiana's education bills.) Similar legislation has been proposed in other states across the country, particularly in legislatures that, like Louisiana's, are overwhelmingly Republican, and teachers and others with an interest in public education would do well to pay attention to what's going on here.

The future of the fight over public schools has a fresh, highly visible face, and it's called StudentsFirstNY. But the new school-reform supergroup, founded by former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and ex-D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee, is in fact not that new at all. It builds directly one of the biggest lobbying forces in New York State, called Education Reform Now. In the last two years, Education Reform Now and the associated Education Reform Now Advocacy have spent more than $10 million to influence state law on hiring and firing of teachers, as a counterforce to the state's two major teachers' unions. Those funds helped force a change in teacher evaluations that unions had opposed, and also backed Mayor Bloomberg's push for layoffs based on teacher performance in place of the current system, in which the most recently hired teachers must be the first to be let go. The $10 million is as much money as StudentsFirstNY director Micah Lasher - until now, Mayor Bloomberg's chief Albany lobbyist - says the new group will spend to influence the next mayoral election.

Few people define themselves as being a member of a special interest. That term applies to the folks on the other side -- the people you disagree with. New Yorkers got more evidence of that this month with the formation of StudentsFirstNY. In a nutshell, the group wants to preserve and extend the education policies of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and battle the teachers union, which has had an increasingly rancorous relationship with Bloomberg. In its mission statement, the group declares, StudentsFirstNY will be New York's leading voice for students who depend on public education for the skills they need to succeed, but who are too often failed by a system that puts special interests, rather than the interests of children, first. Nice sentiments. But the people behind this statement hardly qualify as disinterested observers anymore than the United Federation of Teachers does. The New York StudentsFirst group is an offshoot of the national organization StudentsFirst, created by former Washington, D.C. schools superintendent Michelle Rhee. It includes many who have backed the Bloomberg administration's education policies over the years -- people who even their foes have come to call reformers. The name persists after 10 years of "reformers" running the city's schools and racking up a decidedly mixed record. Whatever they have or have not done for students in New York City and beyond, though, these policies have helped make some people rich and successful.

The 2012 "Education Reformers" - They bully, they're arrogant and they appear to believe that the law applies to others but not them. As Michelle Rhee and the other out-of-state "Education Reformers" pour into Connecticut to join their allies in the effort to Governor Malloy's ill-conceived "Education Reform" bill you'd think they'd recognize the importance of following Connecticut's laws. But apparently these "Education Reformers" either believe they are above the law on simply don't care if they get fined for violating the lobbyist rules we have in place.

While the bullying can be witnessed in the discourse coming from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former-chancellor Michelle Rhee, and billionaire-reformer Bill Gates, one of the most corrosive and powerful dynamics embracing bully politics is the rise of self-appointed think-tank entities claiming to evaluate and rank teacher education programs. A key player in bully politics is the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). NCTQ represents, first, the rise of think tanks and the ability of those think tanks to mask their ideologies while receiving disproportionate and unchallenged support from the media. Think tanks have adopted the format and pose of scholarship, producing well crafted documents filled with citations and language that frame ideology as "fair and balanced" conclusions drawn from the evidence. Nothing could be farther from the truth.